


The Shirt Off His Back

by Carrieosity



Series: Tumblr Ficlets - Yuri!!! on Ice [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, College Student Katsuki Yuuri, Fluff and Humor, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Teacher Victor Nikiforov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 20:36:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18373622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrieosity/pseuds/Carrieosity
Summary: Yuuri has always wanted to meet his soulmate. Victor's feelings were more complicated.





	The Shirt Off His Back

Yuuri Katsuki had been looking forward to meeting his soulmate as long as he could remember. The black script running the length of his inner forearm had fascinated him long before he was old enough to even realize that, apart from the usual cryptic nature of such things, the first words Yuuri would ever hear his soulmate say had not even been written in his own alphabet, let alone his own language.

He wasn’t terribly worried. If the universe wanted him and his soulmate to find each other, his mother had reassured him, it would all work out somehow. Even so, he decided, it couldn’t hurt to try to simplify things just a little, to try and meet his soulmate halfway.

“So, Russian,” giggled the blonde girl who’d claimed the desk beside his own. She watched him from beneath lowered eyelids with a flirtatious smile. “Is this a required class for your major, or are you just a sucker for punishment?”

Yuuri just shrugged, glancing around the room. The chairs were set up in a large ring around the instructor’s desk which sat in the center of the room, forcing everyone to stare awkwardly at each other rather than forward toward a neutral blackboard. “It’s an elective, but…I’m interested in it. There were no Russian classes back home, though.” He’d tried teaching himself, using books that his local librarians had borrowed for him from libraries in bigger cities, but that had only gotten him so far. He could read some basic words, but the spoken aspect was far beyond him.

“Everybody’s got their thing, I guess,” said the girl, looking dubious but still determined. “Like, my roommate is totally into Crossfit. Can you imagine? Anyway, my name’s Hollie.” She held out a hand to shake.

“Yuuri,” he replied, extending his own hand. As he did so, his sleeve fell away from his wrist slightly, exposing the “день” that was the second word of his soulmark. Hollie’s eyes locked onto it with laser sharpness.

“Ooh,” she murmured. “Now I get it. That sucks.” Yuuri frowned questioningly, and she shook her head. “Just makes it harder, I mean. But good luck, I guess!”

Yuuri winced internally at his seat neighbor’s attempt at encouragement. “Thanks,” he said. She smiled again and appeared about to ask more questions, when suddenly the door to the classroom burst open and a literal god strode through.

Yuuri’s brain screeched something that was in neither Japanese nor Russian.

The instructor was tall, built like he should be standing on a plinth in a museum somewhere, and had a shock of glossy silver hair falling perfectly over one eye. The other eye, scanning the group of students with faint laugh lines crinkling the corner, was a piercing blue that sent shivers down Yuuri’s spine that grounded out somewhere in the vicinity of his groin. When the man stopped at his desk, dropped his briefcase and beamed, Yuuri’s heart stuttered in his chest.

“Добрый день!”

The roaring noise echoing in Yuuri’s head was the only reason why it didn’t immediately register that those words of greeting, chirped by his teacher in a deliciously sultry accent, were the same ones he’d been tracing on his own skin, struggling to pronounce, and waiting for literal  _years_  to hear spoken to him by the person whose soul was meant for his own. A moment later, though, the internal noise was drowned out by the sound of every voice in the room replying in unison.

“Добрый день.”

Well, shit.

* * *

Victor Nikiforov had been dreading his eventual introduction to his soulmate for as long as he could remember. It wasn’t the idea of having a soulmate that worried him—not at all! He had always been a romantic at heart, and the notion of having one person out there somewhere whose heart was a perfect match for his own should have sent him into transports. If he’d had a mark like his friend Georgi’s, which simply said, “Waiting right here all along,” he’d have been overjoyed. Even “Yuri, get on,” which was written on his younger cousin’s wrist would have been fine, if a little pragmatic.

There was nothing pragmatic or romantic about the words on his own chest. Little Yuri still laughed himself into choking fits whenever he saw Victor changing clothes.

There were plenty of people whose soulmarks, devoid of the context with which they’d be delivered, were baffling. He’d seen offensive ones, too; Christophe, Victor’s roommate, was disturbingly proud of the string of expletives curving along his tailbone. They did seem to carry a feeling of ecstasy rather than anger, so Victor supposed he could understand Chris’s anticipatory satisfaction, at least, though Chris’s parents had been mortified and refused to tell their son what the words meant until he was old enough to figure them out for himself.

Victor, despite having long been able to read his own phrase easily, still hadn’t figured it out. At least, he hoped he hadn’t, because the possibilities he could imagine were not ones he relished.

“Maybe you’ll find work in fashion,” Chris had sympathetically proposed, but Victor hoped not; not only was he uninterested in that sort of career, but it would mean that his soulmate would be a rude client. Victor couldn’t bear rude people.

“They’ll probably be some perverted mugger,” Yuri liked to snicker, and…well, he had a point. Victor had to admit that a bizarre robbery was one of the first scenarios he’d imagined, himself.

“There’s no way to know until you know,” his mama had consoled him when he broke into frustrated teenage tears over the teasing. “Perhaps it will be a once in a lifetime situation, and your soulmate will say those words out of pure and good need, and everything will make sense. Have faith.” Victor loved his mama, and he wanted so much to believe her, so he tried not to worry. He’d put it out of his mind as much as he could, thrown himself into his studies, and now he was teaching his very first Russian class as a graduate teaching assistant. His thesis was the talk of the Languages department, and everything in his life was going exactly the way he wanted it.

Minus a soulmate. But he had his dog, so he wasn’t too lonely. Not incredibly, anyway.

The students in his class were all attentive, eager to learn, and Victor punctuated his greeting with a wink that pulled a sigh from somewhere to his right. “I’m glad to meet you all,” he continued, now in English. “My name is Victor Nikiforov, and that wasn’t a bad try for the first day. But I’m sure you’ve all read the syllabus and the opening chapters of your text, so we can dive right into our first lesson. No sense in wasting time!”

The layout of the room was intentional, letting Victor whirl around and be visible from all sides as he labeled nearly every item on his desk and the surrounding area with large, bright cards that identified each object with its Russian name. He called out the words as he labeled them, waiting for the class to repeat after him before moving on. They seemed an enthusiastic bunch, for the most part, all except for one young man who seemed rather stunned, for some reason.

Once he took note of that, Victor couldn’t keep his eyes from returning, over and over, to the student. He was Asian, maybe Japanese, with dark hair falling forward over the rims of his glasses. His frankly adorable glasses, Victor decided after another few glances. Glasses that slightly magnified a pair of mesmerizing amber eyes. With a cough, Victor realized he’d almost accidentally led several dozen students to the belief that the Russian word for “chair” was “lovely.”

“So!” he said with a clap of his hands, trying to pull his lesson back on track. “Let’s practice! You should know from your readings how to construct simple declarative and imperative phrases using the verbs ‘to have’ ‘to want,’ and ‘to give,’ so turn to the person next to you and start trying to use these new vocabulary words in sentences! If you’ve forgotten what you read, you may use your books.”

Victor leaned back against the desk and watched the pairs of students start trying to stammer their way through simple phrases, usually to the complete bafflement of the partner trying to translate what they were hearing. He let them struggle on, trying not to let his face show his pained reactions to their mistakes. Victor knew he was throwing them into the deep end of the pool right off the bat, but he figured they’d learn how to swim eventually, and, really, these were the basic constructions a person would need to know if they arrived in a foreign country, right? “I want a bathroom,” or “I have a passport”?

* * *

“Crap, what’s the word for ‘paper’?” Hollie grumbled, squinting at the desk. “Is it… _smeara_?”

“The first letter is pronounced like a ‘b,’ and the consonant in the middle is like a ‘g,’ not an ‘r,’” Yuuri corrected. “So,  _bumaga_.”

“God, I’m so gonna fail,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Your turn. I guess I’ll just pretend I know what you say. Maybe I can still switch to Italian or something.”

Before Yuuri could open his mouth to take a stab at his next phrase, Victor startled them all with another loud handclap. “All right!” he called out. “You’re all doing…not awful!” Yuuri and Hollie glanced at each other, each wearing a look of amused disbelief over what apparently passed for encouragement from their teacher. “I’ll start coming around now, so you can each show me how you’re doing. Make sure you’re rolling your r’s!”

The class hesitated, watching each other, and waiting to see who the first sacrificial victim would be.

* * *

Victor tried not to be too obvious, even as he found his feet pointing toward the Japanese student almost of their own volition. Even if he was dying to hear what sort of voice the guy had, he still had to maintain his professional bearing. He’d been trying to overhear the young man and his partner as they worked, but the man’s voice was just too soft to make out over the noise of the room.

With effort, Victor forced himself to turn toward the girl sitting beside the Japanese student instead. Her eyes popped open wide, and she made a sort of strangled noise in her throat when he smiled at her. “Привет,” he said, then tilted his head expectantly. Blushing, she fumbled her way through what might have been a request for a pencil, given extreme latitude and generous interpretation of her vowels. Victor just nodded when she finished.

“Keep trying, and you’ll get it,” he said, turning away as she flopped forward; her forehead connected with her desk with a thunk that sounded rather painful, but Victor was already focusing on his primary target.

“Go ahead,” he purred to the Japanese student, making sure to give his most charming grin. Victor couldn’t wait to hear his voice. Would it be a sweet tenor? A rich baritone?

The student cleared his throat, blushing self-consciously in a manner that had no business being that adorable in a just world. “ _Day mne tvoy rubashku?_ ”

There was silence in the room. Everybody stared, waiting; most of them were probably simply confused about what had been said, but Victor was frozen for entirely different reasons. He felt as though the wind had been knocked from his lungs.

The cute young man frowned, looking nervous. “Was that…was that wrong? I’m better at writing than speaking, and I think I messed up some of the vowels, but…” He was wringing his hands, growing more and more panicked the longer Victor went without the ability to reply.

_Say something! What should I say?_

“Yuuri, did you mean  _ruchka_? That’s how you say pen, right?” The blonde girl was leaning over to whisper in the young man’s—Yuuri’s—ear. “You said it with some extra stuff in the middle. Try it again.”

“Oh, God,” Yuuri said softly. He put a hand over his eyes. “Sorry. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

The sight of Yuuri’s flushed face reached peak cuteness, and Victor had to shake himself to break the spell. “You asked…well, you said, ‘Give me your shirt,’ actually.”  _You said my soul words! And not because you’re a kinky robber! Oh, Yuuri!_

It was perfect. The warmth in Victor’s chest swelled until he thought he might burst. He could never have imagined such a perfect way to finally meet his soulmate! Mama would weep tears of happiness! Little Yuri would pretend to be sick! Victor didn’t care; he just wanted to sweep Yuuri into his arms and hold him tight for as long as he—

Yuuri made a strange sound, face contorting. Stammering something in what was probably Japanese, he practically fell from his seat, nearly tripped over his bag before snatching it from the floor, and bolted from the room. Victor watched in amazement.

Well. One thing was for certain: his soulmate was definitely full of surprises. Victor couldn’t wait to see where those surprises would take the two of them next. “Class dismissed,” he said, already making new plans.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Добрый день (Dobriy den’) = Good afternoon
> 
> Привет (Privet) = Hello


End file.
